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I wonder if others have been using the Brain for professional references.I have a few thousand reference papers on the brain in the form of pdfs, some work-related (pediatric critical care medicine) and some part of my personal interests. I have them organized by topics, taking advantage of the ability to have one reference under multiple topics, and also cross-linking related papers as sister thoughts. The title of the thought is usually the year the paper was published, followed by the main idea or the main piece of information I gathered from the paper, and the journal in parenthesis (e.g. "2015- Medication X does not work in ARDS (JAMA)"). I use quick view to quickly glance at the paper if I need more info, but for many of these thoughts I use the "capture icon" tool to assign the quick view screenshot as the icon for that thought. (I guess that won't be necessary in Brain 9, as it gives you a preview of the pdf in the thought pane). I use keywords sparingly (e.g. "key" for a very important paper).I tried many other programs to organize my references, including dedicated reference managers as well as other programs such as EverNote and DevonThink, but none could match the flexibility of the Brain, its visual representation of where a paper belongs and what it's related to, and the ability to cross link disparate pieces of information. If a paper required a lot of hand written notes or a paper mind map, I scan that note and then link it to the paper, so that I have my own notes and thoughts on the paper right on the brain.Again, I'm curious if there are others using the Brain this way.

I used to use TheBrain for monitoring and keeping up to date with state, federal and local tax and reporting requirements. So not exactly, but yes I did (and still do) use it for structured and referential access to documentation. I speak in the past tense not because I stopped using TheBrain, but because my position changed so I no longer need to track this any more.

TheBrain is the only software I've found that allows me to reference URLs, notes, and files in the same "container". I found (and still find) it invaluable for archiving the form and instructions, making notes of common pitfalls or questions about them and including links to not only the source site, but related information in a structure that's easily searchable and displayed my information in a non-overwhelming coherent manner. I agree, TheBrain 9 will improve on this capability yet again. I'm already starting to see how including previews or the web site in the preview gives me more immersion in my data and removes some cognitive roadblocks.

I think this original use was one the things that really cemented TheBrain as the center of my "electronic" life. I saw how effective it was at allowing me to keep on top of things in a manner that made sense to me. As I experimented and fine tuned the structure so it was more efficient and effective at communicating the information I needed, I saw ways to carry it over to other areas.

I'm currently using TheBrain for documenting database and reporting references, scripts and other references, in addition to documenting and keeping information related to my personal interests, and as a work and personal log.

I tried - and failed - to use TheBrain at work.I could see its usefulness for the same reasons you and zenrain pointed out, essentially :crosslink concepts / documents / websites WITHOUT the constraints of a spreadsheet / database / project management app.

In this respect, again I agree with zenrain, I have found no other software that does that.

What I did was modelise a number of IT industry customer projects in a loose (but common) structure.In that respect it works.

Where it failed is that it was a "closet application" used by me, for me. I had no way to effectively share my effort. I showed it to others, but nobody was about to install an application with a learning curve without a visible ROI.

I do not have the opportunity to try TeamBrain. I suppose it overcomes exactly this problem.But then, this is a product that would be given top-down by management to users.Bottom-up, from user to peers, I simply couldn't get TheBrain to be adopted.

I still keep it for personal use of course.hope this helps.cheersenkidu

Enkidu, a few years ago I used the brain as a knowledgebase for the company I was working at. I was able to collect material and put it as part of a web brain on a USB to give out to all of the engineers every six months at training. This way the engineers could have the reference with them when they went back to their part of the world to work with customers. I also included the brain native file for those that wanted to install the version (free version great for looking).

For a long time because of this experience I have been fighting a loosing battle of a good local export. Unfortunately the local export is frowned upon instead everything is driven towards the on-line service. The HTML export is still a descent option.

I'm a graduate student in Ecology. I have been using thebrain partly as a reference manager. I said partly because I also put a lot of other things in it.

One of the major "root" though for my Brain is "Ecology", and the subjects under ecology would be the child thoughts.

Under each bigger topics I will have a ", ref." thought as a child thought, and under that the references. I use the "author, year" as thought names as how I would cite them. A reference can also have author(s) as parent thoughts, and cite, cited references as jump thoughts. They can also be listed under a kind of todo list.

I made little icons for different type of references: paper, review, book,...

While I am "studying", I am mostly curating this brain. As it grow and become better organised, I am more familiar with the topic. When I start to write, I will make a lot use of the structure of the brain.

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